Court documents related to a recent gun-trafficking case in New York and obtained by Forbes revealed that the FBI may have a tool to access private Signal messages.
The documents revealed that encrypted messages can be intercepted from iPhone devices when they are in “partial AFU (after first unlock)” mode.
“The clues came via Seamus Hughes at the Program on Extremism at the George Washington University in court documents containing screenshots of Signal messages between men accused, in 2020, of running a gun trafficking operation in New York.” states Forbes. “There’s also some metadata in the screenshots, which indicates not only that Signal had been decrypted on the phone, but that the extraction was done in “partial AFU.” That latter acronym stands for “after first unlock” and describes an iPhone in a certain state: an iPhone that is locked but that has been unlocked once and not turned off.”
